


A Wednesday Evening in Late June

by nellywrites



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, Episode Tag, F/M, Melancholy, Pining, Platonic Bed Sharing, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 23:53:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12376746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nellywrites/pseuds/nellywrites
Summary: Six weeks after Rip disbands the Legends, Sara runs into him at a bar. Inspired by Sara's line in 3x01 about running into one of Rip's agents and stealing his entrance badge. This is a scenario where that agent is actually Rip himself.





	A Wednesday Evening in Late June

**Author's Note:**

> As I said in the summary, this was inspired by the idea that Rip was the agent Sara stole the badge from. That doesn't happen on the page here, it's more an exploration of a scenario where that would be possible.

A Wednesday evening in late June, 2017, the shittiest bar in Star City. Beer-sticky counters and cracked peanut shells on the floor. A man sitting at the bar. In his clean, bureaucrat suit, he stands out as a thing that doesn’t belong.

 

An anachronism.

 

She’d recognized the back of his head as soon as she walked into the bar. That ridiculous haircut. The sell-out suit. It’s not enough for him that he took her ship, her job, her city, now he’s gotta show up in her bar, too. But she’ll be damned if she lets him keep it.

 

She mentally unfurls her laundry list of grievances, fully intending to make him hear every one of them. There's no magic time portal that can save his smug ass from her wrath this time. So she takes the empty seat to his right (and isn’t that ironic) and waits for him to notice her. When he turns, he looks at her through red-rimmed, tired eyes and there's no surprise there, just the somber, heavy resignation she's used to seeing him carry. Disappointment tempers her ire down to irritation.

 

He’s already drunk.

 

Back up. Rewind:

 

Around six o’clock on a Wednesday evening in late June, 2017, a man walks into a bar.

 

The place, a dive bar at street level with three apartments upstairs, smells like cheap booze and cigarettes. Four or five men, middle aged, are drinking at the bar. They are probably construction or maintenance workers, blue-collared, unlike the man who’s just walked in. But like him, they seek to drown themselves in cheap, bitter drink to postpone arriving home alone to face the scary emptiness. He flags the bartender, orders a scotch, _and keep them coming_ , he says.

 

Tonight, he intends to forget.

 

Fast forward, three, four hours. A woman walks into a bar. She is angry and he is already drunk.

 

It’s been six weeks, but the sight of him still boils her blood, the betrayal burning like a fresh wound, and she wonders if he will ever stop getting under her skin.

 

It’s been six weeks, but really, it's been five long and lonely years and the sight of her, so alive in her anger, still leaves him dumb.

 

“Miss Lance,” he says. Her name feels heavy on his liquor soaked tongue. Yet inescapable.

 

“Rip,” she answers, intentionally despoiling him of any of his titles, bringing him down to her lowly civilian level. If looks could kill he’d fall over dead on the spot.

 

The air between them hums with all the things they haven't said. Their silence, negative space. If one squints _just so_ her anger transforms into hurt, his dismissiveness into longing.

 

In front of them, on the TV above the bar, a teary woman talks to a reporter about the mystery blonde woman who saved her from an attacker. That woman is a hero, she says.

 

His lips quirk up in a sloppy smirk.

 

“Gee, I wonder who that was.”

 

“Screw you,” she says, resenting the sarcasm in his voice.

 

“Ah, there she is.” She’d managed to make it a whole three minutes without cursing him. He's impressed.

 

“Was that something else I was supposed to give up on your decree? What do you want from me?”

 

“Well, you have to admit, you're not exactly being very subtle, miss Lance.”

 

Of course it would be about that.

 

“Are you afraid I might save the wrong person and upset your new friends at the Bureau? Are you afraid you might have to come after me?”

 

“They’re not my friends,” he slurs into his glass.

 

He figured it out eventually. That’s where he’d gone wrong with them, the Legends. He’d kept them at arm’s length when he thought of them as only tools in his arsenal against Vandal Savage. (Not her, though, she'd always managed to get under his skin.) And then, after, when willful duty bound them together, he watched them all grow closer, but the circle of friendship had been closed to him. No one to blame but himself really. He can't fault them. He'd never let them in.

 

He'd tried to let _her_ in.

 

And she, well she’d thought they were friends, once. He'd seen the worst of her and he hadn't been afraid. He saved her life. He gave her purpose, he'd said _I believe in you_ and the memory of it still steals the breath from her. But then he’d stabbed her in the back. She’d let him go that day because she thought he needed to find himself. _That_ , she understood. But she thinks about the man who emerged from that portal in Los Angeles, standing tall and proud like she'd never seen him before and she wonders if they'd broken something in him when they broke time. If the real Rip is out there somewhere displaced in time. She’d gone to the ends of time trying to save him before, she'd do it again if it meant fixing this.

 

“I missed you, miss Lance.” He wouldn't be saying that if he were sober but he's waited five years to see her again and it doesn't matter that he's not supposed to be saying things like that.

 

“You don’t get to say that. Shut up,” she says. How dare he? How dare he say that when he’d been the one to walk away? And why does she care? Why does she allow him to continue to hurt her?

 

Why does she still crave his validation?

 

“How can you sit here and tell me you missed me after what you did? To me?”

 

He flinches away from the volcanic heat of her hurt. He hadn't lied when he’d praised her leadership, hadn't faked his belief in her. Only, he'd looked around and found no room for him by her side. And so he walked away. How was he supposed to know things would unravel the way they did?

 

“I didn't do anything _to_ you.” _Liar_. “This is so much bigger than your feelings, Sara. I’m trying to fix things.”

 

“What does that mean? Fix what?”

 

He doesn’t answer, he's said too much already. He swallows down his response with what's left in his glass. He feels the world tilt and sway around him.

 

He's too drunk to fight and she's too sober to keep it going. She's had enough of his secrets.

 

“I'm taking you home,” she says. “Where's your place?”

 

“That's classified.”

 

Sara huffs, resigned, “My place it is, then.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Sara's place is small, just a studio with only the bare essentials: a bed, a table, two chairs. It feels like he takes up too much space just by standing there. She can't breathe.

 

What's she going to do with him now that he's here?

 

He’s here, in her space, unsteady on his feet, his eyes heavy and fixed on her face, his cold hand on her neck, thumb to the butterfly flutter of her pulse. He’d snuffed that out once. It still haunts him.

 

“I’m so sorry, Sara,” he says, slightly pressing his thumb down. “You died. I had to let you.”

 

Phantom pains stab in Sara’s side. She remembers how cold she’d been lying on the snow, blood pouring out of the wound he'd made on her body. His hand on her neck feels suddenly disquieting. But he goes on ...

 

“And your sister she was…”

 

Her heart seizes, her breath falters as she realizes what he’s talking about.

 

Three arrows to her chest. A tumble off a roof. Knowledge of a thing cannot impede it. He knows this, perhaps better than anyone.

 

“I wanted to tell her I understood because I’d also held my dead love in my arms that way. But I couldn’t. So, I lay flowers on your grave. Gardenias and rain lilies. And I would look at that date on the gravestone and remind myself it wasn’t forever. That your death had an expiration date and I would save you.”

 

He touches his forehead against hers, his scotch laden breath on her face.

 

“I changed time for you.”

 

“And you let her die.”

 

He’d killed her, too, and she forgave him, because she held herself responsible for his trauma. But for Laurel? She calls on that old rage just to get through tonight, _Sara, just get through tonight._ She pulls and pulls on the thread but the anger slips away from her grasp. How can she hold onto it when he’s staring at her with liquor hazed wet eyes, looking, for a moment, like the man who’d once absolved her and declared himself the monster instead?

 

Her own uncomfortable revelations threaten to come forth. She holds her tongue instead of saying: _I used to hold your compass to my chest, hoping it would lead me to you_ . And _I blame myself for what the Legion did to you_. What's the point of baring herself to him? In the morning, he'll be gone again and it'll be as if this never happened.

 

The morning will take all truth from them.

 

“Sara,” he whispers, her name on his lips like benediction. “Please, forgive me my unworthiness.”

 

He might as well render her amnesiac with a flash of his machine.

 

She sets him down at the foot of her bed. She strips him of his suit jacket, letting him take care of the shirt buttons. She pushes his oxford shirt off his shoulders until he’s left in an undershirt and lets herself look, without the guilt this time.

 

It's been five—no, nearly seven—years and he is not a man in mourning anymore. And she could reach out and lay her hands upon the pale skin of his freckled shoulders, push him back and take them to that yet uncharted place between reverence and wrath. But she doesn’t because if he were to circle gentle hands around her wrists to stop her, she thinks she just might pierce the world with the steel of her hurt.

 

 _Come here_ , he says, curling on her bed like he's done it many times before. Like he belongs there. She takes off her boots and her jeans and settles on the bed beside him.

 

The narrow space between them might as well be a chasm.

 

“Someday, Sara,” he says, before he closes his eyes.

 

How perfectly mistimed their timing.

 

He reaches out toward her chest, and she holds her breath. His palm flattens over the space between her breasts, where her heart beats strong and steady.

 

Five years. And one of them with her dead.

 

Her hand curls over his.

 

In the morning, she’ll reclaim the anger and remind herself of the dangers of confusing energy with possibility. But for tonight, with his hand on her heart, she’ll embrace the sadness and let herself sink under the weight of what could have been.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
